How does Cisco provision and provide IT to its own staff? That's where the Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure (CITEIS) effort comes into play.

Michael Myers, Director Technical Services for Cisco Global Infrastructure Services, told Enterprise Networking Planet that with CITEIS, Cisco has been able to dramatically reduce the provisioning time for application infrastructure. The CITEIS cloud has enabled Cisco to deliver a typical mid-size application to users in 15 minutes, down from an average of 5 days. The cost for running applications has also been reduced to $25,000 a year in 2013, down from $75,000 in 2009.

The effort to build the current Cisco CITEIS infrastructure, known now as Gen 2, began in 2011. Myers noted that the goal was to use Cisco technology where possible and to leverage the power of open source components. The first release came out in June of 2011, based on the Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud suite. The full infrastructure solution also leverages Cisco UCS servers.

"CITEIS is a combination of the cloud services portal and the Cisco process orchestrator, as well as a set of automation packs that Cisco has produced," Myers said. "It all produces a self-service solution that delivers infrastructure and platform services." Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: Cisco CITEIS Delivers Elastic Infrastructure Services